29 Aug 2012
While we mourn the loss of a very good man, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.
The moon was beautiful tonight. Clouds tried to hide it, but the need to illuminate was too great, a reminder of the immensity and scale of the world beyond our charts and maps.
The death of Neil Armstrong is such a strange marker for our species: he was but one of the human beings that touched that piece of heaven. Eleven others have that opportunity, but we remember one man. He symbolized something greater than the successful completion of a race: Neil Armstrong represents our capacity to dream beyond ourselves, to imagine that which is not a part of us as within our power to attain. First we believed that the moon, the stars were more than lights above us and then we reached up to grasp them. We gathered stardust with our hands.
Because of Neil Armstrong, our children know the vastness of our potential. They look up at the moon and, realizing what is possible, dream of standing amidst the stars. One day, in the not-distant future, one of those children will be part of Armstrong I and mirror his steps on Mars, further forging our pathway through the stars.
I can’t wait.